If there’s an upside, it’s that the Conference on Disarmament is already a broken instrument. Its members openly refer to its “current paralysis.” It’s failed to negotiate a fissile material cut-off treaty for 13 years running, a core part of its rationale. As a forum for negotiating arms reduction deals, U.N. Dispatch‘s Mark Leon Goldberg writes, it’s “a backwater in the U.N. system.”